Product Information

IBM MaaS360

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Starts at £2 per device per month for the SaaS deployment that we tested.

Quick Read

Strengths: Lots of functionality.

Weaknesses: Requires a commercial app store and deployment can be extremely challenging.

Verdict: This is a real powerhouse, but it is not for the faint-hearted. Best for organisations with an IT force experienced in enterprise-level mobile device management.

Rating Breakdown

SC Lab Reviews

Reviews from our expert team

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4/5

Summary

Of all of the products that we tested, this was the most challenging to deploy. That said, IBM offers support during pilot and production deployment and we absolutely recommend that you take advantage of it. We tried to deploy this without help from IBM support and failed miserably. There are way too many detailed steps and convoluted instructions for a product of this quality (after deployment, of course). Somehow, from the deployment and implementation side, MaaS360 feels unfinished. This seems to be a case of not enough automated process.

However, once deployed, the end-user experience is fairly smooth. Security is excellent and the policy capabilities are what you should expect in a product of this type. The usual delineation between organisational and personal apps and data certainly are present. Perhaps the high degree of flexibility available in the tool contributes to its complex deployment. There certainly is a huge amount of functionality once the system is deployed and it is never simple to exploit large feature sets to their best advantage.

There also are some real pluses in this product - starting with the management side. Once deployed, there is a lot of horsepower for managing users, data and mobile access to organisational assets. Policies are flexible and you should have little trouble matching the MDM policies to your organisational mobile device policy.

When we set the system up with the help of MaaS360 support - which went much smoother than our individual efforts - each user enrollment was simple. Most users familiar with how to download and implement apps should have little or no difficulty. Those who for whatever reason don't have that familiarity will be more challenged.

Support from the MaaS360 team is excellent but documentation is hard to find and can be difficult to use. We typically expect the vendor to supply documentation, usually on a thumb drive sent to us, but that was not the case here. As an example, the usual deployment guide was not provided to us. Instead we were given a website to go to so that we could start our trial.

For deployment and rollout, we highly recommend that you have a very solid understanding of your environment and that you assign your best IT pros to do the job. MaaS360 support emphasised to us that they rarely had deployment difficulties if the customer-side folks were seasoned IT pros. After our "lone wolf" deployment experience we understand completely.

The range of supported devices is extensive. Support is included, a big plus. The website has a lot of information on it. Support is through the IBM portal. Pricing is reasonable and, given that support is included, actually is quite aggressive making it a good value once deployed.

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